A Lament for the ‘Tasmanian Tiger’

A Lament for the Tasmanian Tiger

Tiger, tiger, you didn’t burn bright

in the Launceston Museum when I was a child.

You looked pathetic: your pelt moth-eaten,

your colour dull, head down as if dejected.

You were stuffed and stiff, and you looked it,

although you were supposed to seem

alive and wild. Even my naive young eyes

could tell there was no spark left in you.

You were all gone even then, quite gone

so I was told, the whole lot of you –

three years before I was born. I almost 

didn’t just miss you being alive and wild.

I think, though, I'd not have encountered you

even then. You were a shy creature, nocturnal,

secretive, hiding in the bush, quick and slinky

to slide out of sight: a ghost, a shadow.

There were whispers. You weren’t extinct.

You’d been seen. On the mainland too, 

even recently, right near where I live now. 

The locals nod, and keep their counsel.

                          ************

I thought I saw you once, when I was still

a child back in Tassie – a flicker of movement

and a different colour, at the edge of a field,

fading back into the bush. So swift! Imagined?

You were bright then: not fire but light, 

stretched out, loping efficiently, a glimpse 

caught through deepening dusk; beautiful … 

vanishing into the wilderness as night began.

Written for Fireblossom Friday: Lament for the Thylacine at 'imaginary garden with real toads. The thylacine was widely known as the Tasmanian Tiger, though it is not related to tigers. It was a unique animal, a carnivorous marsupial.
Image: CC BY 2.O Wikimedia Commons